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TOMORROW’S GAME

Roberto Clemente, the Hall of Fame right fielder from Puerto Rico, left an indelible mark on baseball history. And me.

12 Gold Gloves. 13 All-Star Games. 3000 hits. The first Caribbean or Latin American player to win a World Series. To win the National League MVP, the World Series MVP. The great Joe Posnanski ranked Clemente #40 on his Baseball 100 list.

His resilience is legendary — rebounding from military service, injury after injury, and a full share of racism. But his day-in, day-out efforts to learn, get better, and do better extended far beyond the diamond. Clemente's mantra, "All that matters is tomorrow's game," encapsulates his philosophy of resilience, perseverance, and the relentless pursuit of a better world. He got up every day and gave himself, and gave back.

Clemente died in 1972 at age 38 in a plane crash delivering aid to earthquake victims in Nicaragua. But his impact has a longevity he could have never imagined.

As US Democrats face the aftermath of a devastating defeat in the 2024 federal elections, we must embrace this mindset. We must learn from our losses, but not dwell on them, adapt and embrace new challenges, and stay committed to fighting for what we truly give a shit about, no matter the obstacles, for the people now who are listening, and everyone who will be born to hear the story.

The Current Crisis

The Democratic Party's current crisis — a long time coming — demands both immediate resistance and long-term power building. Great news for everyone keeping score at home: these are not separate tasks, but mutually reinforcing necessities.

In a few weeks, the Democrats will be almost entirely out of power on the national stage, and the new administration, however chaotic, promises a daunting array of cruel hammer blows: the U.S. leaving the Paris Agreement again, blowing right by the 1.5°C warming threshold, cutting clean energy investments, draconian tariffs on clean tech, and holy campaigns against public health, reproductive rights, and civil liberties.

The Democratic party of old isn’t perfect — clearly! But at least they tried to not kill you.

(Sometimes.)

What we have here is a crisis on multiple levels. So, in the spirit of everything we make, what the hell can we do about it?

Learning from Loss

Democrats have lost like this before, and recently.

The Party spent the mid-2000’s celebrating Obama and ignoring state and local elections, to the glee of Republicans. They were left to gloat and execute their down-ballot strategy and built formidable, long-lasting power over states, voting districts, and uteri.

We paid the price many times over, but we also learned from those losses and responded with renewed organizing efforts at every level.

Sure, 2000 was a sliding doors moment, or a hinge point, but so was 2008, and 2012, and 2016 for sure, 2020 thank god, and now, 2024. But as historian David McCullough reminds us, "Nothing ever had to happen the way it happened."

We make shit happen, or we don’t. No one is coming to save us.

We must accept the outcome, learn from our mistakes, and focus on what comes next, like a pitcher giving up a home run and continuing the game. All we get to choose is how we react to this.

And you have to react to it. Mourn all you want, put your head in the sand over the holidays (I have been living in a pink and green WICKED fever dream for over a month now), but believe me when I say this is happening.

I’m just a bit terrified of how I’ll handle the everyday anxiety and stress of this next episode of America, so I’m spending the next month making myself more resilient than I have been in years. I’m gonna need it.

Defining Our Values

In the US, we live in two-party system, which sucks, but in case you are among those who think the parties are actually mostly the same, there’s some helpful differentiators. For example, of the two parties, Democrats are the only party not actively furthering the return of white Christian nationalism.

“Democrats”, then, are the default party for “people who give a shit.” To move forward, “people who give a shit” must not only campaign better, but clearly articulate what we give a shit about.

We must fight for our values in exceptionally clear and approachable language, even if it makes our traditional base uncomfortable. Our core principles — effort, teamwork, and purpose — must guide us as we face this challenge.

We can’t afford to be timid or vague in our convictions. As all those turncoat VC’s in Silicon Valley CA (sorry, Austin TX) like to say: it’s time to build.

Building Progressive Power

To build true, overwhelming progressive power requires three interconnected forms of infrastructure:

1. Sustained organizing networks — including redoubling resources and participation in the groups that got us this far

2. Alternative information channels, based on shared values, reaching deep into non-political lifestyles, and decentralized from the mothership

3. New civic institutions hellbent on human rights and democracy

Our work here and our new app, What Can I Do?, are specifically built to support these ideas and the most effective organizations and candidates that fight for them.

I understand that right now the last question you want to ask is “What can I do?” You are tired, and fucking bummed, but we have to do this work, now. We know what stands in our way, we know how to organize.

There are so many reputable, hard-working state and local organizing groups that were birthed after 2008, 2012, and especially after 2016, fighting The Long Defeat.

But in the same span of time, union power absolutely cratered, and the world got online and less trustful of one another — not only of each other’s opinions or what facts are, but that we’d have one another’s backs when shit went down.

We need you, reader, to join or re-join those groups, to communicate and operate on a shared set of irrevocable universal values from a decentralized but far better funded apparatus of giving a shit. These groups need your fresh legs, fighting for everything fundamental from clean air and water to maternal health and mental health to malaria and cancer vaccines to affordable food, tampons, childcare, and education.

There is so much to do, but when successful these mechanisms reinforce each other — if we reinforce each other and tell our stories.

We know how to operate as the minority party. But we also have to operate — with unhinged glee and fervor — as the opposition party while we fight to take back the myriad groups we abandoned, misunderstood, and left to be brainwashed.

We have to let loose a million new voices that agree on our baseline vision of a good life, where one life is not worth more than another, to let those voices position themselves in niches they know but we clearly don’t, to appeal to groups we have either ignored or even chastised in the past.

We have to be loud and excited to tell those in power, from cities to the senate, "Fuck no, we will not help you hurt people."

At the same time as all the yelling, we have to control what we can control, at local and state levels, making lives better wherever and however we can.

We have to do the proven, basic shit that represents the fundamental truth of the situation, that multisolves for the majority of our real-world, here-and-now problems and opportunities.

We will fight righteously, from the bottom up, for alternatives that truly serve the American people in 2025 and seven generations later.

Adapting to New Challenges

To be effective, we must reach people in unconventional ways. We can't just be right; we have to be in power. That means not playing close games and rethinking how we build power.

For too long, Democrats have misconstrued the views of highly educated advocacy organization leaders with those of average voters, particularly on issues like immigration.

We spent so much time on racial identity politics that we didn't see Latino or Chinese American voters prioritizing personal security and economic stability. And most crucially, we lost the single biggest voting block in the country — young white men.

We cannot simply rely on winning some close games, because winning some close games means never building long-term power.

I cannot say this clearly enough:

We cannot protect and lift up marginalized and disenfranchised communities without consistently and reliably being in a position to do so.

As AOC put it, "We can't just be right, we have to be effective." And right now, the Democratic national party is very, very ineffective.

There is a fundamental misunderstanding of how political messages reach voters in 2025, with the collapse of local journalism and the rise of right-wing media buyouts creating vast news deserts flooded again, this time with sustained conservative presences.

If the media, institutions, politics, world, and global order that our great-grandparents built by way of the Industrial Revolution are coming to an end, we have no choice but to build new ones, like non-profit newsrooms that report on the historic, exorbitant profits most workers never see.

Quite simply: Our power has to come from somewhere new. From the sun, from each other, sources of energy and progress that have been there the whole time but we’ve never committed to unleashing in full.

The Path Forward

We must join reputable organizations, construct local information networks, document abuses of power, and demand Democratic leadership that understands politics is about conflict.

As much as there have been some days recently where a part of me definitely wanted to, we didn't build this project to give up now. Important, Not Important was born in the Trump years, refined in the Biden years, and it will persist as western democracies crumble left and right.

Our rules of engagement are simple:

1. Do not fucking capitulate ahead of time

2. Conflict averse is for the cowards and the comfortable

3. The calvary of old is not coming. They have the US president, Congress, the Supreme Court, an incomprehensibly large media ecosystem, Silicon Valley, Wall Street, the billionaire owners of every remaining newspaper and social network, and the richest man that has ever walked the earth pulling the strings

4. Platform and fight for our values and 80/20 policies wherever we can, multisolving for housing and housing and housing and clean air, water, and food, vaccines, wealth creation, free lunches, public schools and more

We can't just focus on winning the next election by another narrow margin. We need to build enough sustained power that the games are no longer even close.

We need to create lasting improvements in the daily lives of Americans alive now and for generations to come and fucking tell them who did it.

That means diverting investments from national campaigns to grassroots organizing, funding and unleashing a wildly diverse media infrastructure that often has little to do with “politics”, and creating new institutions that can outlast any one election cycle because they are founded on the vigorous defense and expansion of a permanent set of human rights.

I don’t want to win close games. I want to learn from our mistakes and absolutely bury these people.

Learning from History

American political change requires both spectacular opposition and lasting institutional power. Democrats have mistakenly treated these as separate choices. Dramatic confrontation creates the energy for institution-building, and strong institutions enable sustained opposition.

We need Joan Westenberg’s "radical, rebellious fuck you optimism" that persists in the face of despair and keeps moving forward, “middle finger raised and teeth bared.”

The history of the labor movement — stripped for parts for decades now, leaving a gaping hole in our power — shows us that progress comes from the combination of vocal opposition to injustice and patient work building lasting institutions that can redistribute power and then protect that redistribution.

Joan continues, “We need this kind of radical hope now more than ever. Not because it will save us – no one is coming to save us – but because the alternative is paralysis. The systems want us to feel small, powerless, apathetic.“

To those systems I say: get fucked.

Being Better Ancestors

We must be better ancestors, right now. Building and rebuilding power happens over years, but how we spend our days is how we spend our time.

Republicans have spent decades — decades — clamoring loudly to anyone who will listen, telling us who they are and what they give a shit about in no uncertain terms.

The control is the point. The cruelty is the point. Lies are the point, the instrument, the lever.

But if citizens are unhappy — delay, deny, depose; prior authorization needed before thoughts and prayers; the next available appointment is in 2027; anesthesia cut short by suits; your home is uninsurable, your apartment and groceries and childcare are unaffordable; an unachievable American dream for most, an incomprehensible fever dream of inherited, compounded, or stolen wealth for a few; take America back — and we refuse to send the old guard off into the sunset — our octogenarian elected officials and equally-old and devastatingly ineffective messaging apparatus, our monstrously regulated housing in our bluest strongholds, our unholy big money thrown at national-level guaranteed wins and losses for incumbents who have never been a bartender, much less a female bartender with an economics degree-turned-wildly popular congresswoman denied a seat of power — those same citizens, no matter their demographic, will listen to the lies — the only story they are being told — and vote in favor of something-has-to-fucking-change.

They voted this time not for tinkering around the edges, not the reformation of imperfect American institutions, but the wholesale delegitimization, and further, deconstruction of them, from morals and societal norms to the entire institutional knowledge of the civil service, the financial system and actual NIH, while building their own new power structures, like unregulated crypto.

What we focus is — very clearly, to everyone who is watching — what we give a shit about.

But good, just governance won’t cut it. That is clear now. Something has to fucking change. If you refuse to adopt the tools of today to tell people what you’re fighting for, you are abdicating the public square and moreover, the last mile of a wide and varied country.

Compound Action — action over time and across people, multisolving for a better, more just world, telling stories of progress and perseverance with every tool at your disposal — is what got us here, and it's what will get us back in the game.

We can't change the past, but we can focus on tomorrow's game.

We can choose to spend our time fighting for what matters most — for basic human rights, for a livable planet, for a society where everyone has a chance to thrive. It won't be easy, but as much as I got into this game excited about shiny new tech, it is now abundantly clear that the only fight worth having is one that guarantees that one life is not more valuable than another.

We must do these things loudly, to loose a kaleidoscope of messengers to argue for basic fucking human rights — and sometimes in imperfect language — a new infrastructure that intentionally broadens the tent with sustained narrative-building to voters and non-voters and bros who never engage with traditional political outreach.

This is the work of our lives, and we are vastly more powerful than we were the first time these fascist asshats were in charge.

As Roberto Clemente taught us, all that counts is tomorrow's game.

Let us approach the fights ahead with the same passion, integrity, and unwavering commitment to making a positive impact that defined his remarkable life.

The game continues, and we're just getting started. We won't settle for winning close games and calling it progress. We'll build a movement so strong, so resilient, so deeply rooted in the lives of everyday Americans that the games are no longer even close.

We'll fight for a future where every child has clean air to breathe, where every family has a safe, electrified place to call home, where every worker has the power to demand fair treatment and fair wages, and where every voice is heard and valued and counted.

That's the tomorrow we're playing for. That's the game that counts. And together, we'll fucking win it.

— Quinn